My mum was a huge fan of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Like him, she managed the neat trick of dying on her birthday. The day before, I was sat beside her hospital bed, writing this. That may well have looked a bit strange to others, but I’m sure she’d have understood.

Valentine’s coming up, so I need a romantic sonnet…Not, you may have noticed, a regular feature of the repertoire. This one features an imaginary relationship in the past, and arose from a visit to the chapel at Bettws-y-Crwyn.

You’ve probably not met the world of schoolgirls’ toilets in a sonnet before, but maybe something sounds familiar. I wrote this a dozen years ago for a school anthology, which wanted parodies of famous poems. It’s based on Shakespeare’s sonnet 138: “When my love swears that she is made of truth…”